Under Saddam's rule, Iraq was dominated by a highly oppressive and violent regime, who is believed to be responsible for the deaths of at least 500,000 people, and with the continued discoveries of mass graves possibly up to a million, including hundreds of thousands in the Anfal Genocide Campaign, which involved the destruction of entire villages via poison gas WMD's. Nearly 4.5 million refugees were created and millions more were left without food and water as the Iraq military deliberately shut off their water and electricity, and isolated Kurdish areas. Medical capabilities dropped in the country from the 80's, when funding was cut by roughly 90%, malnutrition and waterborne diseases became exceedingly common, and maternal mortality increases threefold. [1][2] With him escalating tensions prior to the U.S. invasion with his neighbors, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iran, as well as with the Kurdish people, in addition to the millions of whom likely would have starved without food, dehydrated without water and died without humanitarian assistance he was preventing from reaching them, we would also have seen a massive war in the middle east. With Iraq having used WMD's, nerve gas and other weapon to kill and hurt innocent people, such as the Halajbah poison gas attack, and possessing illegal weapon's, fear was also present that he would continue to murder people with these weapons or provoke neighboring countries he was invading to use WMD's in retaliation to his actions, which could have lead to a global conflict involving WMD's. If the U.S. and Russia were pitted against each other in this war, with the U.S. backing Israel and Russia Iran, a global nuclear war could theoretically result. Like with the Cuban missile crisis, the world would edge closer to annihilation and global tensions would rise exponentially. The war had one of the worst humanitarian crisis's in History, the worst since WWII, until the Syrian civil war.
These tragic events occurred before the U.S. invasion, and the U.S. invasion, as well as the dozens of other countries involved in the conflict's, goal was to help these people and prevent the war from spreading. Despite the claim U.S. air-strikes or attacks were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, more realistic U.N. and humanitarian estimates put this figure at around a few thousand civilian deaths at most, and even organizations like wikileaks which initially claimed 14,075 civilian deaths later reduced these figures to only a few thousand as well. A total of approximately 150,000 people have died since the U.S. invaded Iraq according to wikileaks and the iraq war logs, the majority of which were not by the civilians or the United States. It was not the U.S. that was responsible for these deaths, but rather the Iraq government. The war did not occur the moment the general public became aware of it, or when the U.S. invaded, but occurred long before this, as did most of the mass murders. Like how Germany murdered millions of innocent people before the U.S. invaded in WWII, Iraq murdered hundreds of thousands before U.S. ground troops even set foot in the country. While it is sad that so many people died, they were going to die regardless of a U.S. invasion, and the invasion ultimately lead to the downfall of the regime, and it's replacement with a far more stable, and less oppressive government. The myth that dictators or in particular Saddam Hussein was or are stabilizing forces in their countries is laughable at best, and an absurd and damaging myth at worst.
It's an important thing to remember the timelines of a conflict to get a good grasp of the situation. The problems in Iraq did not begin at the start of a U.S. or global invasion, but rather had been occurring long before that. The U.S. invaded Iraq on March 20th, 2003, long after most of the horrific problems of Iraq had occurred. In 2002, Saddam had released virtually all the prisoners of the country, letting rapists, murderers, violent criminals and even terrorists roam the streets of his country. [1][2] The country's electricity had dropped from a 9300 megawatt capacity in 1990 to 3300 by early 2003 before the U.S. invasion, nearly a third, and rose to a 13,000 megawatt capacity as of 2016, after the U.S. intervention. [3][4] Saddam selectively cut off power to groups he was attempting to murder, such as the Kurds, and left them without food, water and electricity in a barren desert that was almost impossible to survive in without. Access to clean water had been reduced dramatically, and in 2004 only approximately 45% of rural areas had access to clean water and 96% in urban areas, compared to 77% in rural areas and 98% in urban areas in 2012, with a dramatic improvement in the quality of the water as well, particularly in regards to salt content, as well. [5][6] The country's GDP dropped abysmally from around 180 billion dollars a year in 1990 to almost zero by 2001, a full two years before the U.S. lead global invasion, and has since risen to between 180 and 230 billion per year as of 2010 and 2018, a nearly 1000% increase from the preceding years. [7][8] The country was destabilizing, and Iraq was encouraging it, by releasing prisoners, turning off the power, and generally murdering thousands of innocent civilians. Without an outside force to stabilize the region, it would have collapsed, necessitating an intervention and an other-throw of the existing Saddam government at the time. This was before any invasion had occurred, and after the invasion, by most objective measures, the country improved dramatically, particularly in regards to stabilization. The concept that it was the invasion that destabilized the country not only isn't backed up by any evidence, but is easily disprovable by virtually all the evidence available. In short, the U.S. intervention in Iraq did not destabilize the country or the rest of the middle east, and there is no credible evidence to suggest this.
